OT: Credit Card charges after original invoice

[Christopher Browne]

On Tue, Jun 23, 2009 at 2:07 PM, Tyler Aviss <tjaviss-Re5JQEeQqe8AvxtiuMwx3w at public.gmane.org> wrote:

> Can anyone comment as to whether charging it a month later is legal if
> not included in the original invoice. Seems to me that Visa is
> probably going to have them for lunch for an unauthorized charge, and
> the competition bureau is probably going to look dimly on this as well
> (as not listing total costs on the original invoice could possibly be
> deemed anticompetitive).
>

Seems mighty inappropriate to me; whether that implies it being illegal or
"anticompetitive" is quite another matter.

This points to a useful service, namely to have
single-transaction/single-vendor credit card numbers.  Thus, your credit
granting agency would give you a (quasi)unique credit card number only
usable with a single vendor/transaction.

That would nicely "cut off" this sort of nonsense.

If you have a vendor you don't notably trust, they get a "credit card
number" that expires immediately after they charge you.

Several US institutions have offered this:
- AMEX "Private Payment"
- Citibank "Virtual Account Numbers"
- Discover "Secure Online Account Numbers"
- Bank of America, MBNA, Chase

There don't seem to be any Canadian institutions offering this.

Oddly enough, there's a relevant link at a putatively Linux-related site:
http://www.linuxfortravelers.com/virtual-account-numbers

There is, by the way, one regrettable "exploit," namely that if the account
is expired, vendors mayn't be able to give you refunds in case of trouble...
-- 
http://linuxfinances.info/info/linuxdistributions.html
P. J. O'Rourke<http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/authors/p/p_j_orourke.html>
- "If government were a product, selling it would be illegal."
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